July 2009

Saturday, July 25, 2009

I am so delighted to see this post that includes Bloom's Taxonomy Wheels by ZaidLearn. I always find that it's far easier to design materials using these wheels than it is to see the verbs/products in lists. Many instructional designers can benefit from these job aids when trying to find the right action verbs for their objectives. Here are some wheels for the cognitive domain.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Michael Nemtsev is a Microsoft MVP and an expert in SharePoint and .NET technologies. With the strong software engineering and development background, Michael has been leading development projects for industry giants like Microsoft, IBM and Dell since year 2000.

Advertisting Age looks at research from Anderson Analytics in a detailed report on the use of social networks. According to Beth Snyder Bulik, in her article in Advertising Age:

Your favorite social network may reveal a lot about you.

"Today 110 million Americans, or 60% of the online population, use social networks, and that number is fairly conservative, because instead of counting unique users or everyone who has an account, as many estimates do, the Anderson study counted only people who have used a social network at least once in the past month.

Users tend to spend a lot of time on social networks. The average social networker goes to social sites five days a week and checks in about four times a day for a total of an hour each day. A super-connected 9% stay logged in all day and are "constantly checking out what's new."

...

Social-network users overall

Social networkers get a bad rap for using social media to pump up their egos and reputations with "fake" friends. But the truth is, in general, they're not super-aggressive about building networks. Almost half (45%) said they will link only to family and friends, and another 18% will link only to people they've met in person. That means almost two-thirds associate only with people they know offline. The fake-frienders are still out perpetuating the myth, though -- 10% of those surveyed said they will connect with anyone who's willing to connect with them.And another myth blown: Most users are not wasting company time. Only 15% said they go on social networks at work.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Karen Leand provides an informative article for managing the time you spend on Twitter. Among her suggestions --

If you want to get the Twitter monkey off your back, but still buy an e-ticket to the social media wild ride, try these seven smart strategies:

1."I save time by syndicating my content automatically to all my social networking profiles: Twitterfeed.com sends my posts to my Twitter stream; the Notes application on Facebook feeds my Facebook profile; the Blog Link app on LinkedIn updates that site. I also use Ping.fm to update my status on multiple social networking sites as well." Denise Wakeman,www.BizTipsBlog.com

2."I practice batch tweeting -- setting aside certain batches of time for Twitter, rather than just dropping into it at random times during the day. Ten intentional minutes on Twitter can help a lot." Darren Rowse,www.problogger.net

Monday, July 13, 2009

Peter writes an excellent article on the pros and cons of using SharePoint vs. other products.

His conclusion?

"When the product matures, if I have organizational buy-in and interest;
a large hardware budget; a high-performance Wide Area Network, and a
budget for consulting, Sharepoint will be a great way to go. Under the
conditions that I have today -- some organizational buy-in; modest
budget for servers and no budget for consulting; a decent network, but
other priorities for the bandwidth, such as VOIP and video -- I'd be
much better served with the alternatives."

Sunday, July 12, 2009

There is a lot of speculation within Learning & Development circles these days about the future of social networking and information search within the traditional borders of "the training department." Are we about to go down the same path we have seen in the newspaper and other printed publishing industries? We're "doing" eLearning, but is eLearning about to become a dinosaur as well?

Is it time to rethink how coporate training operates, and FAST?

Tony Karrer asks the following key question in a very informative article.

"While training as a publisher of courses and courseware faces an increasingly challenging market, what other things can learning businesses successfully sell to internal or external customers?"

Time: July 23, 2009 from 9am to 2pmLocation: OnlineTony KarrerThis online event will bring together people with a variety of
perspectives on what we should be doing today to set ourselves up for
success going forward. We will look at questions that include:

• Is this a temporary downturn or changing landscape?
• How will demand change?
• What will internal or external customers pay for that's not traditional training?
• What's already selling today?
• What business models, products, companies should we be watching?
• What should we be doing today to be in position for the future?

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Here is an excellent article from Ruhani Rabin full of suggestions for retweeting on Twitter.

Some suggestions on why you want to RETWEET:

A post has any news or information that you want to share with others

A post that has helpful information that can help out other users of similar interests

Information exchange and appreciate good tweets

The most important part - don't forget the limitation of 140 characters. Every time you re-tweet, it can easily add up to 10 characters into the topic. He recommends setting your re-tweeted or tweeted post limit to 120 characters. That way
you will have free space if someone wants to re-tweet your post.